Shareholdings of Fraunhofer

Fraunhofer Venture

CoSee GmbH

Das Unternehmen

CoSee GmbH 

CoSee develops and markets search and protection solutions for digital media on the internet. This includes in particular the detection of watermarked works for copyright protection purposes.

For years, the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT has been successfully developing digital watermarking algorithms for audio, video, and image data. However, soon it became apparent that, for complete protection, it is not sufficient to solely watermark the works requiring protection. Before a watermark can be retrieved from a work, the work needs to be found first. Based on this idea, the MediaSearch Framework was developed, which today constitutes the technological foundation for CoSee GmbH services.

However, soon it became clear that offering search and protection services was not within the Fraunhofer portfolio. Thus, under the federal business start-up program EXIST and with participation of Fraunhofer Venture, CoSee GmbH was founded as a Fraunhofer spin-off in early 2009.

The Technology

Unsere Leistungen

CoSee is the expert for finding digital works on the internet. Based on the MediaSearch Framework originally developed at Fraunhofer SIT, CoSee searches the internet for all kinds of works (music, audio books, images, videos, etc.). This search constitutes the core of all offered services. 

How and where does CoSee search?

For the targeted search, most various distribution channels for digital works on the entire internet are considered. This includes:

  • Filesharing networks (such as BitTorrent, Gnutella, eDonkey, etc.)
  • Sharehosters (such as RapidShare, Megaupload, etc.)
  • User-generated content sites (such as YouTube, Flickr, etc.)

CoSee simulates the behavior of users searching for digital works. The search is fully automated.

Finding watermarked content

One particular focus is on the search for watermarked content especially for copyright protection purposes.